Last Chance Kitchen finale: Umeboshi to spare

Welcome to Top Chef, Not Top Scallop, the world’s greatest Top Chef recap blog. This is a recap of Portland’s last two episodes of Last Chance Kitchen. Read my recap of last week’s LCK here and the latest Top Chef episode here. You can watch the latest LCK here. 

If you’ve ever worried about Top Chef being overly prone to producer influence, allow this two-part Last Chance Kitchen finale to remind you that Uncut Colicchio is nothing if not a fair and consistent judge. If he weren’t, he’d have allowed the more interesting narrative to play out, the one in which feared frontrunner Sara, emboldened by the chip on her shoulder, continues her winning streak before reminding the competition why she went home too early. Instead, she serves a bento box with wet rice that noted Sara fan Tom can’t look past. Byron, a classy guy and great chef who just never made a splash this season, wins. An upset, sure, but one that drains some of the drama out of the follow-up challenge, given that he was just never as big a threat as Sara was in the competition.

Their battle, inspired by the Japanese garden which hosted last week’s tofournament, is to make a bento box featuring:

• A rice or noodle

• Meat or fish

• Vegetable

• Pickled item

“Don’t box yourself in,” says Tom. “Make sure your rice is cooked,” advises Avishar. “Oh, hey,” exclaims Gabe, Maria, Shota, Jamie, and Dawn, who wander into the LCK kitchen believing they’re there for a Quickfire. Sara and Byron map out their boxes and Bravo makes a typo:

QUAL EGGS. Got yer ass.

Byron runs like Mario:

Kristen returns with the latest alum to join the Top Chef bubble. It’s Brooke, Seattle runner-up, Charleston winner, and most anxious person I’ve ever seen on TV. As the two winners who overcame LCK to capture their crowns, they are the right picks to join Tom in declaring:

Sara’s box consists of green tea ume rice, pan-fried QUAIL eggs, oven-roasted eggplant with sesame, and daikon pickles with shiso lychee and bamboo shoot.

Byron dishes up salmon tataki with umbeboshi glaze, string beans with yuzu koshu, sushi rice with wakame, and pickled shiso eggplant.

Sara, who began the season by performatively downplaying her “grandma food,” bids adieu by coming full circle and declaring that she recognizes both her talent and the value of her oddball cuisine. She’s my pick for winning the next All-Stars, which we’ll be getting in, what, 2026?

Byron’s not back in the competition just yet, though. Tom tasks the visiting chefs to prepare boxes with 10 ingredients that they’d like to see Byron turn into a composed dish. Knowing a twist is on the way, they all pick ingredients they would also like to cook, just in case that twist involves them dirtying up their aprons. Byron, who doesn’t know who prepared which box, then chooses three of them. He’ll go on to cook against the creators of those boxes across three rounds. He must win two of the three cooks to return to the competition.

“Never a dull moment in Last Chance Kitchen,” says Brooke, prompting everyone to laugh like it’s the end of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Wasn’t that funny, guys.

Byron picks Gabe, Maria, and Jamie’s boxes, and Tom says it’s up to them to “defend your turf.” Byron chooses to cook against Gabe first, Maria second, and Jamie third.

It’s an odd choice to pick Gabe, the shrewdest and most consistent of the remaining chefs, first, but he does so because it’s vegetable-forward and also Gabe said he was thinking of Byron while preparing it. Perhaps that’s true, but Gabe also reveals he picked the box with his own dish in mind, meaning he’s focused and precise while cooking. Byron, meanwhile, flails a bit before figuring out his approach.

Byron’s bacon and radicchio salad is praised for the way its sweetness balances its bitterness, but his bacon, Tom notes, isn’t fully rendered. Gabe’s braised radicchio, which looks like a delicious lasagna, is lauded for being “more developed.” Gabe wins, and Byron, whose exhaustion is evident, has to beat both Maria and Jamie to reenter the Top Chef kitchen.

“I feel like a circus monkey,” Maria says as everyone makes fun of her for throwing 13 tomatoes in the blender. Her box, packed with ribeye and mushrooms, is tailored to her strengths, but not narrowly so. Sure, it’s got ancho and chipotle powder, but you can just about anything with meat, tomatoes, onions, and butter.

Maria’s mushrooms are lauded as the “star of the show,” garnering more praise than anything in Byron’s dish, which is celebrated more for its “solid technique.” Her loss, then, is due to a unnecessary pinch of salt, one Shota encouraged. She doesn’t fault him for it, but he feels like shit.

When Tom asks Byron why he chose Jamie last, he oddly says it’s because she had the “easiest” box and that he wanted to save the easiest for last. Not only does that not make sense, but it lights a fire under Jamie, who roars into the round with a ferocity that has the sidelines cheering.

She gets her comeuppance, too. Neither dish is perfect by the judge’s standards—Jamie’s is dinged for its spice level, Byron’s for its gummy noodles—but Jamie’s coconut braised kale secures her the win and gives us this, the most unhinged celebration in Top Chef history:

She’s upgraded from pistols to an assault rifle. I’d love to see her mime a bazooka.

Farewell Byron, farewell sideline chefs, and farewell Uncut Colicchio. That’s it for LCK this season.